July 2011
9 posts
3 tags
How Do You Solve a Problem like (a Dead) Ahmed...
Uncertainty plagues Southern Afghanistan.
Today Ahmed Wali Karzai — the half-brother of President Hamid Karzai and the main strongman of Southern Afghanistan — was shot twice in the head and killed in his house in central Kandahar. Though the Taliban originally claimed responsibility for the murder, reports suggest he was killed by a close confidante, a man named Sardar Mohammed, in...
4 tags
What Adm. Mullen Really Said about Pakistan
Islamabad is furious with Washington, again. At the heart of this particular furor is the implication that Pakistan was involved in the brutal kidnapping, torture and murder of Asia Times Online journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. Days before he went missing, Shahzad had penned a searing report asserting that an attack on Pakistan’s primary naval base was carried out in retaliation for ...
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"The Bluest Eye" and #Fiction5
The New York Times’ new #Fiction5 Twitter hashtag got me thinking about the most affecting of my fictional favorites, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It’s a heavy, intensely melancholic read, but it radically transformed how I conceive beauty, and the ways I look at others and myself. Read it and maybe you’ll also never look in the...
Impact Journalism: The Invisible Army
Very proud of the talented Sarah Stillman, whose brilliant New Yorker investigation into the treatment of T.C.N.s on U.S. military bases spurred this amendment to the DoD Appropriations Bill in the House yesterday.
She documents the widespread mistreatment by subcontractors — including human trafficking and sexual assault — of foreigners recruited to work for the American military...
